I went into a restaurant bathroom stall. We were there early for lunch, and they must have just cleaned the bathroom, you could see water on the floor in places (smelled like cleaner).

I sat and didn't notice that there was a puddle of it by my feet. I was wearing loose cotton pants and thought I was holding them up.

When I was done I pulled up my pants and felt wet on my thigh. Then stinging. Yay, mop water on my thigh. Blargh! Luckily we could run home and I could change and shower and toss the pants in the wash. I haven't had the heart to look and see if they were bleached or not.

That is EXACTLY why I never, ever, ever travel in pants. I can't count how many 'puddles of unknown origin' I've stepped over/in in bathrooms when travelling, and was SO thankful I could just hike my skirt up.

I'd even advocate for kilts for men. Floor water in bathrooms, even if I *think* it's cleaner, squicks me out in a major way!

I don't know what kind of rodent is making the puddle of decomp that I smell....but the downstairs is rapidly getting gross. The guys can't smell it or refuse to admit that they do so they don't have to join the cleanup efforts...I'm not sure which.

I went into a restaurant bathroom stall. We were there early for lunch, and they must have just cleaned the bathroom, you could see water on the floor in places (smelled like cleaner).

I sat and didn't notice that there was a puddle of it by my feet. I was wearing loose cotton pants and thought I was holding them up.

When I was done I pulled up my pants and felt wet on my thigh. Then stinging. Yay, mop water on my thigh. Blargh! Luckily we could run home and I could change and shower and toss the pants in the wash. I haven't had the heart to look and see if they were bleached or not.

That is EXACTLY why I never, ever, ever travel in pants. I can't count how many 'puddles of unknown origin' I've stepped over/in in bathrooms when travelling, and was SO thankful I could just hike my skirt up.

I'd even advocate for kilts for men. Floor water in bathrooms, even if I *think* it's cleaner, squicks me out in a major way!

VorGuy had to toss a pair of pants because of bleach water.....

I came home from shopping yesterday to change pants because of "mop water" or possibly "leak at base of toilet water" - but I had to pull the pants back up to leave the store to drive home.....

Woo, I finished the thread! And like many others, I am now a devotee of Vorbau's posts and eagerly await the next story time.

I have a few contributions, some minor and three... er... emphatically not.

Minor: My cat likes sweet biscuits and often 'asks' to share whatever I'm munching on. This evening, I was reading (this thread, actually!) and sort of absent-mindedly holding a half-eaten ANZAC biscuit off to the side. Kitty decided she wanted a share, jumped up, and started delicately nibbling at the biscuit edge before I noticed... so I said "oh, okay, you want some? Here," put the bit she'd nibbled on in my mouth and bit it off to give to her. I didn't even think "wups, cat cooties" until a few minutes after. It doesn't actually bother me, but I realise some people would be horrified.

A little less minor: I once discovered how bad a sinus infection was when I had a shower, things got loosened by the steam, and I horked up a rope of fluorescent yellow slime that was as thick as my thumb and a bit longer than my hand.

Still pretty minor: A previous much-loved cat got bitten on the haunch by a dog. Luckily she escaped with only one deep puncture wound in the meat of her thigh, but because it was so deep it had to be kept from sealing over so that it could heal from the bottom up. The vet taught me how to keep it open and clean with a cotton bud (Q-tip to the Americans, I think?). Cen was such a sweetie, she'd lie there and let me do it while meowing a little to let me know it was ouchie, poor kitty, and thankfully it healed up well after a couple of weeks of cleaning up thin pinkish-yellow drainage.

A step up the ick scale: A different previous much-loved cat got in fights fairly often (she wasn't called Shredder for nothing) and developed a nasty abscess on her cheekbone. This also needed to be kept open to heal properly, but was a trickier proposition because kitty wasn't happy with me messing with her sore spot and the drainage was much, much nastier. Bleah. Sticky yellow goo. And then after it finally got to the point where it was safe to let it scab over and finish healing, it must have started itching, because Shredder started coming to me and offering her face in the hope that I'd scratch her scab off...

The first really icky one: If you have a barbecue for all your friends, the centrepiece of which is a whole lamb on a spit roast, don't leave the remains outside on the spit to cool for several hours before carving the rest of the meat off the bones and putting it in the fridge. Even if the spit roast is enclosed and you put the lid down, it's got ventilation holes and the flies will get in once it's no longer hot enough to fry their wings. (We live in Australia. The flies will get in even if they have to invent little tin openers.) You will discover this the next day, when you tell your teenage daughter (me!) to make sandwiches for everyone's lunch and she then finds that only the outer layers of sliced lamb are cold... the inner layers are surprisingly warm, and honeycombed with little tunnels that the HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of maggots have eaten out. You may, if you are very unlucky, have already eaten several pieces. (I hadn't, but Mum had, and she turned an interesting shade of green.)

The second really icky one: I had a very laid-back male pet rat for a few years, who sadly developed cancer. By the time it was diagnosed - it looked exactly like a minor cyst he'd had before in its first stages, and the vet and I both thought it was just one more - it had developed to the point where removal would have required amputating his left back leg at the hip. He was too old to put through that, so the vet told me to spoil him as long as he was still reasonably comfortable. It kept growing until it was a very large, hard lump and started to interfere with his walking, but he was still active, seemed happy and alert and in no pain... and then I discovered that the tumor had outgrown its own blood supply, the center of it had died and started to rot, and it was infested with maggots. My sweet ratty boy got taken on one last trip to the vet (in his ferret walking harness, which got him a few compliments and head-scratches on the way in, so he was happy).

Okay, here's the REALLY icky one, given its own post because it deserves the full treatment. A mere paragraph is insufficient to convey the tale of how Mel Is A Mighty Huntress, Yo. This is copied from my blog and... er... has had the details fleshed out, because my blog is not a Gross Out thread and random visitors to it have not been adequately warned.

Our house has an insulated roof space. Roof spaces get rats. It's part of the whole thing of living in a house; it's shelter, and all sorts of things want to SHARE. Well, we don't particularly want to share with rats, so the attic has traps in it, and every so often the Good Ethnic Boy (hubby) will climb up there to re-bait and/or re-set any traps that need it, and recover the... ah... occasional victim. (This is not because I'm squeamish or lazy; it's because I'm taller than him, and don't fit up there very well. Sensible division of household chores, and all that.)

Choosing the right trap is important. We use snap traps, because live traps leave you with a rat that has to be dealt with somehow, and frankly we don't check often enough for that to be humane. Snap traps, however, have to be strong. Just about any snap trap can deal with a mouse. A rat caught in a weak snap trap is not a dead rat; it is an upset rat with a very heavy necklace.

About a month ago, at a bit past midnight one Sunday night, one of the snap traps in the roof went off. I heard it, because it was in a spot between insulation batts above the bathroom.

I then continued hearing it. Please see the above paragraph about choosing the right trap.

The Good Ethnic Boy was asleep. He continued to be asleep. He's a heavy sleeper, and I wasn't going to wake him up; poor honey had had an awful few days, and I didn't think being woken up by me and immediately required to go deal with a Situation in the roof would be a good way to start the week. So, I got the ladder out of the garage, got his heavy gardening gloves and a torch and a bucket, climbed up there...

...got the rat...

...and was faced with having to deal with the rat.

I like rats. I have had many, many pet rats in the past, and probably the only reason I don't have pet rats now is because the Good Ethnic Boy does not like pet rats. (He has also nixed the idea of pet snakes, dangit, and I'm pretty sure if I were to catch a poisonous spider to keep as a pet again - yes, again - he would be Deeply Upset.) However, I wasn't about to try to keep an adult wild rat as a pet even if hubby thought it was a wonderful idea, and while I felt very sorry for it... well, releasing it would have invalidated the whole point of putting kill traps in the roof, and leaving it stuck in the trap looking at me would have been inhumane.

So I took the rat (still in trap) out to the garage, found an extremely dirty towel that had been used to wrap stuff for storage and then in the garden, found a hammer, covered the rat with the towel so it couldn't see its doom coming (and so it wasn't looking at me), aimed VERY VERY CAREFULLY, and... applied the hammer.

It was quick and humane. I am a Mighty Huntress. I am frickin' CONAN. Okay, no, not Conan, he wouldn't have apologised to the rat and probably would have eaten the darn thing for breakfast the next day, but Conan also doesn't live in a nice house with a lovely husband and people try to kill him all the time. I can live without being Conan.

The Good Ethnic Boy was very impressed when I told him the next morning, very grateful that I didn't wake him up to do the Manly Thing, and frankly surprised that I didn't get stuck up there between joists or trusses or whatever the awkward wooden bits you have to climb through are called. So was I. Also, if I ever have to go up there again, this time I will get the kneepads out of the garage cupboard first, because ow.

We keep the litterbox in our office closet to keep it well away from guests. If I don't clean BeanKitty's litterbox enough she will begin going #2 on the carpet next to it. We normally clean it twice a week so it's not horrifyingly gross but BeanKitty can be a bit of a prissy snowflake about it. Husband refuses to have anything to do with the litterbox as it's "my cat, my problem". Whatever.

Well I had been meaning to clean out the box this weekend but apparently didn't get to it quick enough. I went to work Monday morning. DH was home from work to meet an inspector so we could get our house re-financed. That's when he noticed BeanKitty had gone #2 right in the middle of the office floor!

Hubby had to scramble to clean everything up before the inspector got there and thought were were horrible, messy people who obviously don't maintain our home. Afterwards, he called me at work to complain and once I'd apologized and promised to do better in the future, I could only giggle and think to myself, "I love the smell of fresh cat biscuits in the morning!"

When i was a baby, my mother gave me my first bite of spinach baby food. There was no warning that I didn't like it. No scrunched up baby face, nothing. Just an instant reaction of projectile vomit all over her. To this day, the smell of cooked spinach results in instant gagging and dry heaving for me.

Now for the gross out story. Dh and our boys are big hunters and this last winter he killed a rather large hog that filled our freezer with lots of pork chops, roasts & bacon. For some reason, DH thought it would be a good idea to keep the skull and mount it. So he put it under a large bucket in the backyard and weighted it down to keep the dogs out of it while nature did its thing. As you can imagine, the smell around that bucket was atrocious. Even though he had it in the corner of the yard all the way at the back, it could still be smelled down by the house. So, after a couple months of complaining DH decides to bury it, hoping to cover the smell while the bugs finished with the skull. When he picked up the bucket, a huge hog puddle spread out all over the ground - about 3 feet across. Hog puddle that had been simmering in the bucket. Under the direct sun. For several months. Oh wow. Unfortunately, DH had yet to actually dig the hole for the head to go in. Fast forward about twenty minutes later and DH has completely buried the head under about a foot of dirt, the air is finally starting to clear and DH comes in to take a shower.

A short while later, I hear one of the kids let the dogs out. I didn't think anything of it until they came back in about 5 minutes later. Not only did the stupid dogs dig up the hog head and all it's stinky goo, but they rolled in it. Head to tail hog puddles and all it's stink. They tracked it all over the kitchen & living room floor and then jumped up on the couch next me and tried to lick my face. Between yelling at the kids to drag the dogs back outside, I was gagging from the smell and DH was laughing so hard he had tears rolling down his face It took over an hour to scrub the couch and the floor until it was clean to my satisfaction. Meanwhile there is a three ring circus in the back yard as DH tries to re-bury the hog head at the same times the boys are trying to bathe the dogs. Beaux hates getting a bath with a passion and is running all over the backyard trying to avoid being caught and Freddie (a long-haired dachshund) who loves the water is sitting in the kiddie pool with a silly grin on his face. It took 3 washes to get the smell off the dogs before I would let them back in the house. I almost didn't let DH back in cause he started the whole mess.

Wouldn't it have been better to leave the hog head out in the open (but out of dog reach)? I have a fox skull from a fox that died on the edge of the back yard. It has a little dried flesh on it that I have to boil off before turning it into a Halloween prop, but at least the fox didn't smell that bad while turning into a skeleton. Then again, maybe I just didn't go into that part of the yard at the critical time.